The eight papers that comprise this volume share a common objective. Their purpose is to examine the spatial organization of a variety of Austronesian houses and to relate the domestic design of these houses to the social and ritual practices of the specific groups who reside within them.

Throughout the Austronesian-speaking world, houses are given great prominence. Many houses are stunning architectural creations. Their construction is a subject of notable study. Such houses — as well as those that are far less striking — are invariably more than they appear to be, and certainly more than simple physical residences. Although a house has a physical referent, the category of ‘house’ may be used abstractly to distinguish, not just households, but social groups of varying sizes. The ‘house’ in this sense is a cultural category of fundamental importance. It defines a social group, which is not necessarily the same as the house’s residential group.

The house, as a physical entity and as a cultural category, has the capacity to provide social continuity. The memory of a succession of houses, or of a succession within one house, can be an index of important events in the past. Equally important is the role of the house as a repository of ancestral objects that provide physical evidence of a specific continuity with the past. It is these objects stored within the house that are a particular focus in asserting continuity with the past.

Most Austronesian houses also possess what may be called their particular ‘ritual attractor’. This ritual attractor is part of the structure of the house. It may be a specific post, beam, platform, niche, altar or enclosure that has a pre-eminence among the other parts of the house and, as such, represents, in a concentrated form, the house as a whole. The rituals of the houses acknowledge this attractor, generally from the moment of construction.

The house itself, and not just the objects and elements within it, can also constitute a ritually ordered structure. As such, this order can be conceived of as a representation of a cosmological order. In some Austronesian societies, the house is regarded as the ancestral ‘embodiment’ of the group it represents. As either representation or embodiment, the house may become a centre — a combination of theatre and temple — for the performance of the ceremonies of social life.

Thus, in a complex way, the house is culturally emblematic: it has a clear, concrete representation but relates to and embodies abstract social ideals and a variety of culturally specific values. From a physical structure — a particular arrangement of posts and beams — one can begin to trace the ideals and social values of a society. To do this is to view a society from ‘inside’ its houses. All of the essays in this volume adopt this perspective, hence the title of this volume: Inside Austronesian houses.

The houses considered in this volume range from longhouses in Borneo to Maori meeting-houses in New Zealand and from the magnificent houses of the Minangkabau of Sumatra to the simple, somewhat ramshackle dwellings of the population of Goodenough Island. An examination of the diversity of these houses gives some indication of the variety of Austronesian houses through island South-East Asia to Melanesia and the Pacific. The intention is to relate these various examples of domestic design to social activities and ritual practice and thereby to consider both commonalities and differences in the use of domestic space in different regions of the Austronesian-speaking world.

Of the three papers on Borneo houses, Jennifer Alexander’s considers the Lahanan longhouse, a massive structure of hardwoods that can be virtually coterminous with an entire village settlement. The Lahanan are a core group of the Kajang in the Belaga region of Sarawak’s Seventh Division. Alexander examines the layout of these Lahanan houses and their division into separate apartments along an extended common gallery.

Each longhouse is associated with its headman and the Lahanan aristocrats who constitute a ‘house-owning group’ and trace their origin to a founding ancestor. Alexander’s paper examines the composition of apartments, and their differentiation, continuity and role in the organization of labour. The Lahanan case makes an excellent contrast with both the Gerai longhouses studied by Christine Helliwell and the Iban longhouses studied by Clifford Sather.

The Gerai are a Dayak community in Kabupaten Ketapang in Kalimantan Barat. Several longhouses make up one village. Increasingly, however, these longhouses are giving way to free-standing dwellings of individual families. The Gerai house, like the Lahanan house, is divided into an ‘inner division’ consisting of individual apartments and an outer public gallery. Gerai longhouses, however, are not ‘owned’ by a particular aristocratic house-owning group. ‘Each individual household owns the nails, planks, strips of bamboo, lengths of rattan, units of thatch and so on which together comprise its longhouse apartment.’ Helliwell argues that to consider such a longhouse as a collection of individual apartments neglects ‘the relationships that flow from one apartment to another, tying them together into a community’. She points to a permeability of partitions and the flow of sound and light that foster an ‘uninterrupted sociability from one end of the longhouse to the other’.

Clifford Sather provides a detailed examination of the Iban longhouse, drawing on specific ethnographic material from the Saribas Iban along the Paku River in lower Second Division of Sarawak. Like the Lahanan and Gerai houses, the Iban longhouse consists of a series of apartments that front onto an unpartitioned gallery available for communal use. Every Iban house is identified with a territorial domain in which individual families grow crops and observe the customary rules and ritual interdictions of the community. Each house has its headman and elders but neither of these constitutes an aristocracy as they do among the Lahanan. Complementing these elders is a custodial figure associated with the origin of the house whose ritual role is to preserve the well-being of the longhouse community. The longhouse itself provides a physical representation of its origin structure in the arrangement of its houseposts. Within the defined structure, Sather examines the performance of Iban rituals and the ‘multiple “orders” of meaning’ that they generate.

Cecilia Ng’s paper is concerned with principles of domestic spatial organization among the Minangkabau of Sumatra. Based on fieldwork in Nagari Koto nan Gadang in the district of Lima Puluh Kota in West Sumatra, this paper focuses on use of space within the house and on the role of women as organizers and participants in the performance of ceremonies whose enactment is carefully set out within the house. Houses, in this case, are associated with core groups of women who provide the ‘source of continuity’ in society, whereas men circulate as ‘agents of continuity’. Men’s lives are defined by a series of outward movements while women’s lives are marked by movement within the house. Generations of women move through the house reproducing lineage continuity. Thus, in Ng’s words, the allocation of space inside the house is ‘a template of the key definitions of male and female identity’.

The Rotinese house presents yet another form of the Austronesian house. Although certain houses, by their history, ancestral associations or by common agreement become the ceremonial focus of much larger social groups, most houses in eastern Indonesia tend to be single or extended family residences. Houses may thus be distinguished by their ancestry as well as by the group with which they are identified, and are categorized accordingly. Among the Rotinese, who number over 100 000 and who now live on both the island of Roti and on the neighbouring island of Timor, there exists a strong ethic to distinguish among the traditions of the eighteen historically recognized, former domains of the island. The traditions of the house follow the traditions of the domains.

The paper on the Rotinese house is concerned primarily with the traditions of the house in the domain of Termanu, a domain of the central north coast of the island. It focuses on the narrative origin of the house and on the house’s physical layout as an oriented structure and as a ‘memory palace’ — a mnemonic cultural design for the remembrance of the past. Like longhouses in Borneo or the houses of the Minangkabau, Rotinese houses are a locus for the performance of rituals but these houses do not provide the same scope for ceremonial enactment. Sections within the house are markers of significance rather than fully-fledged performance sites. Much of the house consists of an inner sanctum that is closed to outsiders. Large ceremonial gatherings spill out to surround the house where rituals are performed, leaving always a portion of the house as a place of ‘inner mystery’.

Similar features can be seen in the houses in Melanesia and in the Pacific. Writing of Goodenough Island in the D’Entrecasteaux Group at the eastern end of Papua New Guinea, Michael Young describes the Kalauna house as a ‘house of secrets’. Architecturally simple structures, Kalauna houses are the repositories of their owners’ magical paraphernalia that constitute the secret heirlooms of the house. Kept well away from visitors, these heirlooms include locked boxes of shell valuables, baskets of bone relics and yam stones and, most importantly, fist-sized black stones that are considered to be inhabited by ancestral spirits.

As is the case with houses in many parts of eastern Indonesia, the Kalauna house has to be considered within a wider spatial setting and in relation to points of orientation within this space. Thus Kalauna hamlets are marked out by various stone ‘sitting platforms’ (atuaha) that are built and identified with groups of lineally related men (unuma). The houses of particular groups in a hamlet are aligned to face their associated lithic monument. Whereas in South-East Asia the dead are often layed out in a specific area within the house, the dead in a Kalauna hamlet are made ‘to sit up’ on their atuaha in front of house (Young 1971:22–23). The rituals of the house must be taken to include the rituals of the atuaha with which it forms an integral part.

Toon van Meijl’s paper on the Maori of New Zealand highlights a similar relationship between the meeting-house and the ceremonial courtyard (marae) for which the meeting-house forms the focal point. Meeting-houses and marae are seen as ‘going together’ and are commonly invoked by visiting orators in parallel phrases:

House standing here, I greet you;

Marae lying here, I greet you.

More cryptically expressed in ritual language, marae and meeting-house are associated with the Maori gods of war (Tuu-matauenga) and peace (Rongo-ma-tane) who are represented as outside and inside:

Tuu outside, Rongo inside.

Meeting-houses are generally named after an ancestor and usually linked to a haapu or ‘subtribe’ group. Van Meijl’s paper examines contemporary meeting-houses, their symbolism and the notion of timelessness evoked through the ceremonies within these houses. The spatial coordinates of the house are linked to coordinates of time and both are condensed in the performance of ceremonies. Van Meijl contrasts this sense of time with the evidence of the historical changes that houses have undergone since the arrival of the Europeans and speculates on how these changes may continue.

The concluding paper in this collection is provided by Roxana Waterson who has written a major comparative study of the house entitled The living house: an anthropology of architecture in South-East Asia (1990). She is also a noted authority on the tongkonan or family houses of origin among the Toraja of Sulawesi among whom she has done considerable ethnographic research. In her paper, Waterson considers many of the ‘shared themes in the uses of space’ touched on by other papers in the volume. These include the idea of the house as an animate entity, as a kinship unit, as a forum for the expression of social relationships and as an image of power and growth. The paper offers a broad perspective on the traditions among the Austronesians and an appropriate conclusion to the volume.